Abu Dhabi’s Cultural Ambitions

Louvre Abu Dhabi -an offshoot of the famed Paris institution -this week offered a preview of the museum’s permanent collection that will open to the public in 2015.

Dubbed “Birth of a Museum”, the temporary exhibition consists of an eclectic mix of 130 objects, an amalgam of artifacts from antiquity to the present with both Islamic and Christian-themed works, as well as paintings from such artists as Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte and France’s Paul Gauguin.

Associated Press

Louvre Abu Dhabi will open to the public in 2015

The new museum, whose design includes a futuristic, spaceship-like dome roof structure, is one of the pillars of a cultural district forming in Abu Dhabi that also includes a branch of New York’s Guggenheim as well as a national museum.

Since the project was announced in 2007, some critics have argued France was selling off part of its national patrimony to oil-rich investors who lacked the cultural credentials.

Laurence des Cars, curatorial director of the Agence France-Museums, the body that oversees the Louvre Abu Dhabi project, said criticism was a déjà-vu comparable to when American museums were buying French impressionist paintings at the end of the 19th century.

“The French press were saying this is a scandal, those cowboys can’t understand French painting, this is just a shame.”

That kind of antipathy towards wealthy buyers flared up again earlier this year when Qatar spent $250 million on Paul Cezanne’s The Card Players.

Abu Dhabi’s partnership with the Louvre hasn’t come cheap either with the emirate paying $525 million for the museum’s branding rights alone. But officials at this week’s exhibition were describing Abu Dhabi’s approach as more discrete and low key than some of its Gulf neighbors.

“Big cultural ambitions need probably important funding. But if you don’t have the idea, if you don’t work seriously on that it falls flat, that’s the trick of it. You can spend a lot of money on it and go nowhere.”